Levels and techniques of evaluation in educational technology

This post explain the evaluation' level and techniques of the study that title "Evaluation of a Virtual Lab Environment for Teaching Web-Application Development. Dept. of CIS, Georgia State University"

• Purpose of the study:
  To examine how one aspect of virtual computing – the virtual lab – effectively addresses many of the challenges of teaching web application development.
• Approaches:
  The subjects for this study were drawn from two related graduate courses. One course (Principles of Web Design) had 13 respondents, while the other (Web application development) had 10 respondents.
  This study uses Statistical methods. It uses survey (Lickert-skale) of the related questions to evaluate H1-H4. while for hypothesis H5-H8 we used the non-parametric two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test which is used to compare means in case of small sample sizes. The regression method enables researchers to identify the factors that most contribute towards the variance in the dependant variable. The dependent variable is ease of use and usefulness of virtual lab. The independent variables are students programming experience (in years).
• Levels of Evaluation:
  The evaluation in this study was done in a program level. It comes with that student’s rate the VL a mean of usefulness (3.75 out of 5) and easy to use (3.45 out of 5).
• Instruments:
  In this study, to collect the data for evaluating the virtual lab, a questionnaire Research instrument is used. The questions used in the questionnaire were derived from standard TAM questions (Meso & Liegle, 2005; Gallivan, 2001; Chircu et al., 2000; Straub et al., 1997) and further included standard demographic questions. Finally, data about the specifications of the primary computer used by each student and how – if at all – they had configured their web server was also collected.
• Reference:
  Jens Liegle, Peter Meso.( 2005). Evaluation of a Virtual Lab Environment for Teaching Web-Application Development. Dept. of CIS, Georgia State University.Atlanta, GA, 30319, USA.